Buglyst Blog
Learn to debug under pressure.
Playbooks for fast pattern recognition, guides for the full investigation, and articles for the engineering judgment around the edges.
18 playbooks · 509 guides · 96 articles · 13 linked practice labs ·skip to practice
Fast pattern recognition for the production failures engineers see most often.
18 playbooks
Debugging Env Var Issues
A concise checklist for incidents where local works but CI, staging, or production changes behavior.
Debugging Cache Stampedes
How to recognize and contain request spikes when cached data expires.
Debugging CORS Origin Bugs
A practical way to inspect origin parsing, credentials, and header behavior.
Debugging Retry Bugs
Retry issues often hide the first failure and create duplicate work.
Debugging Timezone Bugs
Time bugs usually live at day boundaries, DST changes, and unit conversions.
Debugging Pagination Bugs
Pagination bugs hide in boundary math, cursor reuse, and new records arriving between pages.
Structured investigations for the failure modes engineers meet in real systems.
TLS Handshake Failure: Connection Reset Debugging Guide
A practical guide for diagnosing and fixing TLS handshake failures that manifest as connection resets, covering packet-level analysis, cipher mismatches, and server-side issues.
OpenTelemetry Metrics Not Exporting: A Field Guide
A direct, actionable guide for debugging OpenTelemetry metrics that fail to export. Covers collector configuration, SDK timing, and common silent failures.
Astro Component Hydration Not Working: Debugging Missing Client-Side Interactivity
A debugging guide for Astro components that fail to hydrate: symptoms, root causes, diagnosis steps, and fixes for missing client-side interactivity.
Debugging TypeScript Module Augmentation When It Silently Fails
A direct guide to diagnosing why your TypeScript module augmentation doesn't take effect, covering ambient module declarations, import side effects, and module resolution quirks.
Postgres Sequence Gaps in SERIAL ID: Why They Happen and How to Stop Panicking
A no-fluff guide to understanding why Postgres serial IDs have gaps, how to identify the cause, and when to actually worry.
CSS Modules Class Not Found: Why Your Imported Styles Object Returns Undefined
When a CSS Modules class import resolves to undefined at runtime, the root cause is almost always a misconfiguration in your build pipeline. This guide walks through the five real reasons it happens and how to fix each one.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
The Art of the Minimal Reproducible Example: A Debugging Superpower
A minimal reproducible example (MRE) is more than just a snippet — it's a tool that isolates the bug, saves time, and gets you faster answers. Here's how to build one that works, with a real-world war story.
Retry Storms: When Retries Make a Cascading Failure Worse
Retries seem like a safety net, but in a distributed system under load they can turn a small hiccup into a full outage. Here's how retry storms form and what to do about them.
Caching Bugs Are the Worst: A Postmortem on Stale Data Disasters
A deep dive into the most insidious caching bugs, with real postmortems and practical patterns to avoid stale-data disasters.
Observability vs. Monitoring: Why Your On-Call Rotation Still Wakes You Up at 3 AM
Monitoring tells you something is broken. Observability lets you figure out why—without guessing, without SSH, without restarting the pod.
Debugging Flaky Tests for Good: A Systematic Approach to Root Cause Analysis
Flaky tests waste time and erode trust. Here's how to find and fix the actual root cause instead of just rerunning.
Idempotency Keys: The Safety Net Your Payment API Needs
How idempotency keys prevent double charges, lost refunds, and data corruption in payment APIs. With real-world examples and edge cases you haven't considered.